Beyond it a muddy square of ground held the foundations of more buildings. A mews yard, I guessed, with a coach-house and stables. More half-built houses backed onto it, with a passage running between them. We hurried down it, emerging onto open ground once more. Ahead was the Marylebone Road, and to our right lay London. Yet the danger wasn’t over yet. The killer was still out here. We needed to reach the city as quickly as possible.
A carriage was rattling along the road and we ran to cut it off. I feared the driver hadn’t seen us, but at the last moment he pulled on the reins. With a great squeal of horse and axle, the carriage lurched to a stop.
Graham tugged my arm. ‘Look.’
He was gazing back towards the houses. The dark figure stood there, holding up his lantern. I couldn’t make out his face in the glare. Then he extinguished his light, merging with the darkness around him.
The coachman was an elderly African with a white beard and an old patched coat. An ancient-looking blunderbuss rested in his lap.
‘My friend and I have been attacked,’ I said, stretching the truth a little, though Graham in his wigless, dishevelled state could easily pass for a victim of crime. ‘Please will you give us a ride into town?’
The old fellow pointed his blunderbuss at me, and I held up my hands, thinking he had mistaken us for highway robbers. One of the carriage doors opened, and Graham stared into the vehicle, his lips parted in horror. I moved to see what he was looking at, just as someone came up behind me. I turned, and was struck on the head very hard. My brain seemed to bounce inside my skull and I dropped to my knees, aware only of a powerful sense of confusion.
I cried out to Graham to run, but my words came out mangled. Rough hands lifted me under the arms and bundled me into the carriage. More hands were waiting there to drag me inside. I kicked out and someone hit me again. Doors slammed and the coach moved off. A bag was put over my head, but I was already sliding down into darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I don’t know how long I lay unconscious. I awoke on the floor of the carriage, my head aching intolerably, my ears still buzzing from the blow I had sustained. My hands were tied behind me and the bag was still over my head. Around me I could hear the familiar sounds of the city by night: the rumble of produce carts, revellers shouting, the cries of a nightsoil man. From the smell, I guessed we were somewhere near the river. I sensed several people were in the carriage with me, but none of them spoke. I lay there trying to work out who had taken me. Was Moses Graham beside me? Or had they left him out there on the roadside with the killer?
The noise gradually receded, until I could hear only the clop of hooves and smell sharper industrial odours: the tang of a vinegar yard, and a stench of rotting flesh and urine that could only come from a tannery. I guessed we were somewhere in the industrial quarter, west of the Borough.
The carriage halted, rocking as the driver climbed down from the box. Someone opened the door, and cooler air washed over my body. I was hauled out and briefly felt cobbles beneath my feet, before I was pushed into a building. I heard a clattering of chains and bolts as the door was secured behind me. More steps forward, and I felt the warmth of a fire. Hands lowered me into a chair and the sack was removed.
Everything swam before my eyes, faces gradually forming in the blur: four young, black, angry, male faces. One of them I recognized: the huge African who had been guarding the curtain in the Yorkshire Stingo. Moses Graham sat next to me, bound just as I was. He flinched from his captors and they laughed.
Three more black men and two black women sat on the floor against the wall. Their clothes were shabby and they gazed at me with wide, frightened eyes. I knew instinctively that they were runaway slaves. Sitting in a wingchair next to the fire was an African in a red hat. One side of his face was horribly scarred. He held a glass of wine in one hand, and a pistol in the other. Caesar John.
‘The fat one was with him when we caught up with him,’ one of the young blacks said. ‘They’d gone off road for some reason, but we made another pass and then we found them. We took the fat one too in case he peached on us.’
They must have been watching me in the tavern. ‘You are the Children of Liberty,’ I said.
When nobody denied it, I turned to Moses Graham. ‘You said Caesar John had nothing to do with them. You said he was a villain.’
Graham looked even more pitiful than he had in Marylebone. His coat was torn and covered in mud, and he had a bruise on his cheek. Yet as he gazed at Caesar John, he mustered a measure of dignity. ‘He is a villain. A wretched parasite who preys upon the weak and the vulnerable. I lied only to protect you, Captain Corsham. You should have listened.’
Caesar John glared at him. ‘I’ve saved more slaves than your books and speeches ever have.’ His accent was as thick and local as London clay.
‘If by saved you mean drawn into a life of criminality from which you profit, then you indeed have that distinction,’ Graham said. ‘But do not think for a moment that there is any honour in it, sir.’
‘If we take, it’s because we were taken from. Now watch your mouth, Negro. Before I cut out your fucking tongue.’
My thoughts were sluggish. ‘Where are we?’ The place was furnished like a sitting room in a cheap boarding house, except all the windows were fitted with iron bars. ‘Why have you brought us here?’
‘This is an old sponging house.’ Caesar John had an ivory toothpick wedged between his teeth and it waggled as he talked. ‘It’s not Buckingham House, but I find it fit for purpose. We don’t keep debtors here, but runaway slaves. You are here because I want some fucking answers.’ He gestured to his men. ‘Bring them through.’
Our arms still tied behind us, we were marched through the hall, into another room. The other men withdrew and Caesar John closed the door behind them. I didn’t understand his anger, but I was afraid of it.
We appeared to be in some sort of storeroom. Handsome pieces of furniture were piled against the walls. Stacked around them were paintings in gilt frames, silver candelabra, clocks, jewellery boxes, vases, silk drapes, piles of fine clothes and wigs, even a bag of golf clubs. If Caesar John was involved in criminal enterprise, then my best guess was housebreaking. I remembered those footmen going through the curtain in the Yorkshire Stingo. Most free blacks worked as servants, and the slaves he’d freed could doubtless pass on much useful intelligence about their employers’ homes.
Caesar John picked up a lamp and walked to a table at the far end of the room. It was fashioned from richly carved mahogany and a dozen people might have dined around it. A naked African was lying on it, and I stared at him in horror. Moses Graham gave a howl of despair.
Caesar John gestured to the corpse. ‘You know him?’
Moses Graham only moaned.
‘His name is Ephraim Proudlock.’ My throat was dry. ‘He was Mr Graham’s assistant.’
‘Poor boy. What has he done to you?’ Moses Graham cried.
Proudlock’s body was covered in cuts and contusions, the blood a darker brown against his russet skin. Like Tad, his throat had been cut. Like Tad, a thumbscrew had been used on him, the fingers grotesquely ill-aligned. Like Tad, Monday’s mark had been seared into his chest: a crescent moon surmounted by a crown. Worse than any of this was the sight between his legs: a horrible mess of blood-matted hair and mutilated flesh. The poor man had been castrated. I prayed that it had happened after he’d died – even as I knew that it had not.
‘A week ago, one of my men, Jupiter, was found like this,’ Caesar John said. ‘He’d been flogged like this poor devil here and someone had mangled his fucking hands. That same fucking slave brand. Whoever killed him prised out one of his fucking eyeballs.’
‘Did Jupiter know Thaddeus Archer?’ I said. ‘Did he ever mention a ship called The Dark Angel?’
He silenced me with a glare. ‘I have business rivals and I thought one of them might be responsible. They denied it, so I let Jupiter’s wife go to the magistrate. He didn’t give a
flying fuck about a dead Negro, so I paid a thief-taker to make inquiries. Last night he heard a rumour that another mutilated black had been found out at Spitalfields. So I went down there and claimed this poor bastard here. Then I read in the newspaper that Thaddeus Archer had been tortured too, which got me to thinking. Archer was one of the lawyers we used for our runaways. I wondered if there was a connection between his death and Jupiter’s, so I questioned my men. I discovered that in recent weeks, Archer had paid Jupiter to do a job for him.’
‘What kind of job?’
He studied me for a moment with his sharp brown eyes. ‘He wanted someone followed, a Deptford sailor.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘No, only that Archer paid Jupiter well. Then you come to my tavern, saying you know Archer. I want to know who killed Jupiter and why.’
That’s why we were here. He was angry about the murder of his man. I sympathized, but that anger made him dangerous.
‘I think the murderer is one of the officers of a slave ship named The Dark Angel. I don’t know which of them it is, but I’m trying to find out.’
‘What beef did he have with Archer? With Jupiter? With this poor fuckster here?’
Briefly, I summarized my investigation to date: the massacre on the ship, the suspects, and my different avenues of inquiry. Caesar John listened, his jaw set.
‘Archer wanted to bring the ship’s officers to trial, but I don’t understand how.’ I looked at Graham, who had fallen silent. A tear rolled down his cheek. ‘Perhaps Mr Graham can tell us more. In any event, someone wanted Archer dead. I think he was tortured to find out who else was involved in his inquiry. He must have given them Jupiter and Proudlock’s names.’
Graham’s head snapped up. ‘Thaddeus Archer would never betray his friends.’
‘You didn’t see what was done to him,’ I said quietly.
Caesar John studied the corpse. ‘Why cut off his cods? Why take Jupiter’s eye?’
‘They are slaving punishments.’ Graham’s voice was thick with anger. ‘If a slave is making trouble at sea or on the plantations, sometimes they make an example of him to discourage the others. Some part of him is mutilated, an eye or an ear. Sometimes his penis. Anything except a hand or a foot – that would render him incapable of work.’
‘I imagine he wanted to know if Proudlock had told anyone else about Archer’s inquiry. As a slaving man, these methods of torture would be a natural choice.’ For a moment fear washed over me, as I remembered that dark figure in Marylebone. I knew about The Dark Angel, and he knew that I knew.
Caesar John pointed his pistol at Moses Graham. ‘What do you know? Speak.’
I turned to him too, eager to hear the rest of the story he had begun to tell me in Marylebone.
‘Well? Speak, you fat fuckster.’
‘Very well – just don’t point that thing at me.’ Graham spoke in a quiet, halting voice. ‘It was poor Mr Proudlock who heard the tale first. It had travelled here from Jamaica, circulating in whispers in the black taverns and the coffeehouses. A story of a Guineaman, a vessel of lost souls, three hundred slaves thrown overboard to drown. Later, we learned the ship’s name, The Dark Angel.’
Caesar John gestured impatiently with his pistol, and Graham spoke more hastily, his words tripping and falling over one another.
‘Mr Archer saw its power from the start. To us, it was just another terrible act of cruelty, but he saw it differently, through English eyes. He believed it had the power to change the way people thought and felt about slavery. Perhaps he was right. I don’t know. He became obsessed with the ship. Proudlock too. I helped, though I confess it made me nervous. Too many people had too much to lose. I was worried what they would do when they found out.’
His eyes strayed to Proudlock. ‘We never believed the official story, you see. Not all of it. A leak was discovered too late and the ship was running out of water – that part I do not contest. But the rest of it was a dreadful lie. The truth, we believed, was infinitely worse.’
My body tensed, knowing I was about to learn something significant.
‘A slave voyage is a finely balanced undertaking. It rests upon the principles of mathematics. Air, food, hold space, water. There is a formula for each.’
I recalled John Monday, rattling off his figures in his warehouse. The costs of keeping men alive and subdued.
‘The clue is that the slaves were killed in batches. Five massacres over the course of seven days. They knew how much water they had, so why not kill them all at once? Why waste water on slaves you knew would have to die?’
Our faces must have looked blank, for Graham smiled thinly. ‘Have either of you gentlemen ever heard of refuse slaves?’
He placed the emphasis in the word refuse firmly upon the first syllable: waste, litter, junk. We shook our heads.
‘When slaves arrive in a Caribbean port – let us say Kingston, Jamaica – they are marched off the boat in chains, then herded into a corral about the size of a cricket pitch. They are confused and frightened and their relief at being upon dry land once more is tempered by the sight of the buyers. The auctioneer rings a bell and the planters rush in, each determined to grab the best slaves first. Africans are fought over, wrenched from the hands of rival buyers. The refuse slaves are the ones left at the end. The lame, the sick, the dying. The ones no one wants.’
‘What happens to them?’ I asked.
‘Usually the captain cuts his losses and offers the slaves for sale as a batch. He takes the best price that he can get, usually significantly less than he paid for them.’
‘People buy dying slaves?’
‘Some die, some survive. They call it the African lottery. The buyer hopes enough slaves survive to make the purchase a good bargain. Every Guineaman has a few refuse slaves, more if the journey was arduous or stricken with disease. Odd then, that The Dark Angel had none at all. All the surviving slaves were sold for full price at market.’
‘The crew have attested they killed the weakest slaves first.’ I was struggling to grasp his point. ‘That is surely not surprising?’
‘Only if you believe their story. As I say, we never did. I believe that with careful rationing of the water, most of those slaves would have made it to Jamaica alive.’
Nausea rose in my gullet, as I started to see it. ‘If they had survived,’ I said slowly, ‘then they would have been sick, wasted with thirst. Refuse slaves. The voyage stood to make an enormous loss. And all the ship’s officers would have lost their part of the profit.’
‘Quite. Yet the slaves were insured at their purchase price. They were worth more to the officers dead than alive.’
I could see that Caesar John understood it too. His expression didn’t change, but his free hand clenched into a fist.
‘Five times the slaves were brought up on deck. Five times the surgeon assessed them. He and the captain made their calculations. They determined which slaves had gone past the point of profit and those slaves were killed.’
I understood now why Tad had been so convinced that this story would change the way people felt about slavery. I saw the rest of it too – how he planned to bring the case to court, and ensure the massacre was written about in every newspaper. He couldn’t bring a charge of murder against the crew, because the slaves were property and so couldn’t be murdered under English law. So he conceived a different way to prosecute them – to quote Napier Smith, a devious, clever lawyer’s trick – one that would only work because the slaves were property.
‘When the insurance claim was made,’ I said, ‘the officers would have had to provide a notarized account of the voyage. Their lie would be on record and underpin the claim. If you could prove that lie, then you’d have grounds on which to prosecute – only the charge would not be murder, it would be fraud.’
Graham’s expression was sombre. ‘It is ironic, is it not? You can kill three hundred black slaves at sea and your courts account it nothing at all. Yet steal from a white man
and the chances are you’d hang for it.’
It was as clear a motivation for murder as I had ever heard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Pallid dawn light was squeezing through the cracks in the shutters. I tried to ignore my pounding headache and the exhaustion crowding my thoughts, listening intently as Moses Graham pressed on with his story.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘to convict the officers upon a charge of fraud, first we had to prove their story a lie. To do so we needed a witness, someone prepared to testify in court as to what really happened upon that voyage. At first Archer had high hopes for the ship’s captain, a man named Evan Vaughan. Archer said he seemed remorseful. But something happened between them, I think, and Vaughan left town. Archer looked for him, but he couldn’t find him. He was despondent for a time, but shortly before he was killed, he told us he had found another witness.’
Our arms were still tied behind us, but Caesar John’s pistol was now pointed at the floor and I no longer believed we were in imminent danger.
‘I discovered recently that one of the slaves on that voyage was taken back to Deptford,’ I said. ‘Could she be the witness he was talking about?’
‘I’m certain he said it was a member of the crew. Archer grew very secretive in the days before he died. He said the less we knew the better. I could see he was afraid and he told us he was being followed. But he was excited too. I think he was nearly ready to lay his charges before a court.’
‘Then the witness could be Daniel Waterman, the cabin boy,’ I said, thinking about my conversation with Napier Smith and Cavill-Lawrence. ‘When Archer returned to Deptford that last time, he told his sister that he was going there to collect something. I think it might have been some papers connected to The Dark Angel. Waterman had his leg broken just before Archer’s murder, apparently because he’d helped himself to someone else’s property. Perhaps he agreed to steal these documents for Archer and someone found out.’ I turned to Caesar John. ‘I saw you outside Archer’s rooms a few nights after he died. What were you doing there?’
Blood & Sugar Page 18
